A robotics and animatronic cosplay enthusiast known as Zibartas has made a real-life NUSA Infiltrator jacket. If you aren’t familiar with the jacket’s lore, it is a bomber jacket from Cyberpunk 2077 with a tall collar that houses a display, here recreated in the “super rare white version.” That feature collar alone packs in $1,200 worth of flexible OLED displays driven by a pair of Raspberry Pi 4 SBCs.

Zibartas begins the video by talking about the inspiration provided by Cyberpunk 2077. As a cosplay enthusiast, the now iconic game has provided a great deal of inspiration for him. With the NUSA Infiltrator jacket design in his sights, the obvious question was – how?

The finished collar is lined with a quartet of flexible OLED displays, costing ~$300 each. Zibartas began by trying to drive them from a pair of Raspberry Pi 5s for portability with enough graphics muscle. However, after a week of pixel wrangling found that the hardware decoders of the Pi 4 were better for this particular task.

Next, the work on syncing the two pairs of displays needed to be done. “At the start, I used direct gigabit network, but it added too much of an overhead. So, I moved to pure hardware GPIO pulses and Python,” explained Zibartas. “In the end, I think I got it to as close as it can get.”

With the techy side of the equation solved, Zibartas moved onto the scissors and sewing stuff cosplayers seem to do a lot of. However, the construction of the curved collar would soon precipitate a tech problem, as the first screen to be fitted was damaged when Zibartas attempted to slide it into its upholstered EVA foam housing. That was a $300 mistake.

After a purported few weeks of extra testing the cosplay fan came up with a semi-rigid understructure for the collar. This bendy new design featured side tracks that resist twisting, so it is expected to prevent the issues that broke one of the OLED screens previously.

With the collar feature of the NUSA Infiltrator jacket now ready to go, we see Zibartas work on other fine details of the design. For example he 3D printed a shoulder-mounted ‘radar jammer’ section in flexible resin. Four indicator LEDs are built into this section, too. All these extra jacket components are finished appropriately in black, chrome, and so on.

As the jacket is fully assembled and finessed we learn that the two Pi 4s and two power banks will be hidden in pockets on the mid-lower back of the jacket and provide about three hours of screen and LED power.

For simplicity, right now, the screens show a pre-baked animation loop. However, Zibartas notes that “since it is Linux and HDMI-capable screens, the sky is the limit.” To prove the point, the video then cuts to the maker and cosplayer enjoying a Cyberpunk 2077 gaming session on the collar display hooked up to a Steam Controller.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.